British regions, found on the map
Twelve regions: nine of them English, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland whole. This is the level the census counts in and the election map is coloured in, and it exists because nothing below it covers the whole union — England has counties, Scotland has council areas and Wales has principal areas, and no two of those are the same kind of thing.
No labels on the map and nothing to pick from a list. The question names a place and you point at it, and every answer comes with a paragraph about what you just found.
12 to find, 8 a run.
2 rounds, 6 of 8 to pass each. Pass one and its places are yours.
Every one on the map
Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the United Kingdom guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.
Scotland1
- Scotland
Northern Ireland1
- Northern Ireland
Wales1
- Wales
North England3
- North East
- North West
- Yorkshire and the Humber
The Midlands2
- East Midlands
- West Midlands
South East and East England3
- East of England
- Greater London
- South East
South West England1
- South West
What the map tells you about each one
The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 12 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.
- Scotland
- About 78,800 square kilometers, which is a third of the land of the United Kingdom holding about 8% of its people. It has kept its own legal and education systems without a break since the union of 1707, and it has had a parliament of its own again since 1999. Around 790 islands, of which fewer than a hundred are lived on.
- Wales
- About 20,800 square kilometers and 3.1 million people, with mountains down the middle of it and nearly everybody living along the southern and northern coasts. Roughly a fifth of the population speaks Welsh, which has been spoken in Britain for longer than English has, and the Senedd in Cardiff has been legislating since 1999.
- Northern Ireland
- Six counties, about 14,100 square kilometers and 1.9 million people, with the largest lake in the British Isles in the middle of it. It is the only part of the United Kingdom with a land border with another country: about 500km of it, with the Republic of Ireland, and the arrangements for that border are most of what the Brexit negotiations were about.
- Greater London
- 1,572 square kilometers, which is about 0.6% of the United Kingdom holding an eighth of its people: roughly 8.9 million of them, in 32 boroughs and the City of London. It is the only region that is one city, and the only one whose boundary was drawn rather than inherited — the Greater London Council took it in 1965 from Middlesex, which stopped existing.
- South East
- The most populous region in the country at about 9.4 million, and the one everything passes through: Heathrow and Gatwick, the Channel Tunnel, the port of Southampton and the ferries out of Dover are all in it. It also holds Oxford, Windsor, Brighton, Canterbury and the Isle of Wight.
- South West
- The largest English region at about 23,800 square kilometers and among the emptiest, tapering from Gloucestershire down to Land’s End. Dartmoor, Exmoor, Stonehenge, Bath and the Jurassic Coast are all here, and so is Cornwall, which mined tin for the Mediterranean before the Romans arrived and has a Celtic language of its own.
- East of England
- The square bay is the Wash, and behind it are the Fens: peat marsh drained from the seventeenth century onward and now the flattest and most productive farmland in Britain. The peat has shrunk as it dried, so the lowest ground in the country is here, at Holme Fen, about 2.75 meters below sea level. Cambridge, Norwich and Ipswich are its cities.
- East Midlands
- Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln and Northampton, with the Peak District at one corner and the Lincolnshire coast at the other. The point in Great Britain furthest from the sea is in this region, near Coton in the Elms in Derbyshire, and it is about 113 kilometers from salt water, which is as far from the sea as it is possible to get on this island.
- West Midlands
- Birmingham, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent and the Black Country, which is where iron was smelted with coke and where a great deal of the Industrial Revolution actually happened. The first cast-iron bridge in the world was thrown across the Severn gorge at Ironbridge in this region in 1779, and the gorge is a World Heritage Site because of it.
- North West
- Manchester and Liverpool at the bottom and the Lake District at the top, which holds Scafell Pike at 978 meters, the highest ground in England, and Windermere, its longest lake. The first inter-city passenger railway in the world opened between the two cities in 1830, and the first stored-program computer ran in Manchester in 1948.
- North East
- The smallest English region by population at about 2.6 million, and the one with the emptiest country in it: Northumberland has fewer people per square kilometer than anywhere else in England. Hadrian’s Wall runs 117 kilometers across the top of it from the Tyne to the Solway, which is roughly, though not exactly, the line the border took later.
- Yorkshire and the Humber
- Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Hull and York, with the Dales on one side and the North York Moors on the other. York was Eboracum, the northern capital of Roman Britain and the place Constantine was proclaimed emperor in 306; its medieval walls are the longest still standing in England at about 3.4 kilometers.
How this one works
How many regions are on the map?
12. Every one of them is on the map, and a run asks 8 of them. Pass a round and the places you found in it drop out of the pool, so the next run is what you have left.
What is a round?
8 of them, and 6 right passes it. 2 rounds cover the whole map, and the counter at the top of the United Kingdom page counts the ones behind you. Passing is what banks a round's finds: miss the mark and nothing is taken off the map, so every place that round asked about is still there to be asked again. Nothing you have banked is ever asked again while anything is still unfound, so the last round of the map is however many are left, and three quarters of that passes it.
Can I start the map over?
Yes. "Reset this map" under the counter puts all 12 back in the pool and sets the rounds to zero the moment you press it, so the whole map is there to be found again from nothing. It clears this map only; the other maps of the United Kingdom keep their progress.
Do I need an account?
No. The game plays in the page, and a guest's progress is kept in their own browser. Signing in carries it between devices and earns XP for a run.
What happens when I get one wrong?
The map names what you actually hit, then lights up the right answer in green and tells you something about the place. Missing one is how most of this map gets learned.
The other maps of the United Kingdom
Denmark has the same map in Danish regions. France has the same map in French regions. Spain has the same map in Spanish regions. Italy has the same map in Italian regions. All three together on the United Kingdom atlas page, the country itself on the United Kingdom guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.